Wozworld’s Weblog

Beginning in July, Cook Library’s Media Resource Lab is undergoing some changes that will have folks clamoring at the door to grab a workstation.  Upon entering the lab, you won’t believe your eyes as floorplans have changed and new equipment is arriving on the scene for student use.  The lab is now divided into a listening/viewing area for users to use AV items, but will also boast a production lab that will be equipped with some neat workstations for you to, according to Cook Library’s Paul Peeling, “Think it, Build it, and Play it!”

CD’s galore
Gone are the days when you had to fill out countless request slips to give to the desk staff to search for CD’s.  The newly designed listening/viewing room has the CD collection open and accessible to all, as students and faculty can directly walk to the shelves and pull the CD’s that they would like to listen to.  Take a look at the song listing and read liner notes of a CD before sitting at one of the room’s 16 listening/viewing stations to give it a spin.  Remember that you can check out any CD’s or vinyls (yep, I said vinyls) that are not on reserve.  All items need to be checked out and returned directly to the staff desk in the MRS lab.

DVD’s and VHS tapes
Sure they are still kept behind the staff desk, but now you can sit with friends and watch the latest video by the San Francisco Symphony or take in Fred Astaire’s footloose moves at a group viewing station.  These items must be viewed in the lab, but with special permission, students are allowed a one time check out if they wish to use these materials in a class for a presentation.

Editing/Production/Creation Playroom
No, we’re not sure exactly what just to call it, but this part of the lab will be equipped with both PC and Mac workstations as well as turntables, CD players, and more with output devices that will allow users to save computer based media files for use in their own creations.  Need to create a podcast and want to add some music?  You can do this in style here, and save your work directly to a flashdrive or your webdisk space.  Let your mind roam free and experiment with audio and video production, mixing, and editing to make you feel like a modern day Beethoven.  Create and save your own MP3 or .wav files or use our color printer and scanner to send your creations home to Grandma to play on her iPod or view on her Blackberry and brag about to all her friends. 

Tell us more
Needless to say, we need your input to make sure we have the latest software and equipment that you want to use.  Please post a comment to tell us what software and tasks you would like to be able to do in the lab.  While we don’t have a genie in a bottle to instantly make it materialize on a desktop, the lab staff would like to try to use your feedback in stocking the lab with stuff for all your multimedia design needs.  So think big and tell us what you would like to see – specific types of equipment, software, and editing programs, etc., accessible in the lab.

And while you are daydreaming……
We are so excited about the whole new look and feel to the lab that we want to change the name of the area to reflect the neat and awesome things that you can do here.  Post your suggestions for a new lab name – both for the MRS lab in general or for each of the two designated work areas.   The sky’s the limit, so as Aerosmith says, “Dream on, dream on, ……..”

Get ready for your tried and true EBSCOhost products to receive a facelift on July 1, 2008.  Yes, your favorite databases accessed through the EBSCO portal, be it RILM or International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance,  will now have a sharper, sleeker interface for the 2.0 generation.  Currently, if you open any EBSCO product, you can take a look at the new interface by clicking on the “New Features” link in the upper right hand corner and opening the “Test Drive” link that is then displayed.  The initial search screen may take you aback with its minimal design, but don’t be fooled – all the old search features that you know and love are still there for you to use.

Where are my limit fields?
In a Basic Search mode, you can still find the limit by scholarly/peer review or document type features.  To see them from the Basic Search screen, you will need to click on Options to see them.  Most of the standard limit fields are listed there.

Advanced Search
Advanced Search screens still look very much as they did in the previous version of EBSCOhost.  Now, however, you can stipulate that you want your search terms to function as a Boolean string, among other choices.  There is also a Visual Search option which is not yet up and running.  From what I can tell by viewing the Powerpoint tutorial, the Visual Search organizes your results in a graphical format for each navigation in moving forwards and backwards in the search process with much of your result lists displaying on your desktop while you work.

Saving, Printing, E-mailing, Exporting
You can still do all of the standard tasks with articles that you find – the icons now, however, are visual images for each task, rather than a printed word.  Hovering over them with your mouse will help you decipher any strange looking icons.

Result Lists
Result Lists have taken on a minimalist appearance, sans gridlines, but the usual HTML, PDF, and Find IT options are clearly displayed and function as they did in the past.  Abstracts and file management options still display after you click on the title of an article, but are now also available as your mouse hovers over the “page” icon next to the article title in your result list.  This eliminates the need to move back and forth between an individual record and the result list and minimizes your time spent in searching for relevant articles.

Want to see more?  Under the New Features link currently displaying in any EBSCO product, you can see an online tutorial by visiting the EBSCOhost 2.0 Support Center link and scrolling down to the Tutorial. It takes a few minutes to view and will give you a sense of all of the enhancements awaiting you in the 2.0 EBSCO world.

This morning I have been amusing myself as I drink my coffee by exploring this new database offered to you through the Subject Gateways for Dance, Music, and Theater.  EEBO, or Early English Books Online, is a database of the full text of early English printed documents (including England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, AND British North America) from 1473-1700.  All documents are available as scanned PDF and TIFF files for easy viewing, and you can print individual pages from documents.  The contents include dancing manuals, books of songs, and plays, just to mention a few of the performing arts documents that you can view.  I have had great fun playing with the search boxes, and the Advanced Search fields and wanted to mention a few things to you and encourage all to experiment with this new product.

Searching
You can browse to your heart’s content, but it is probably best to begin by choosing either Basic or Advanced Search to start to look for materials.  In the Advanced Search mode, you can also select your document type, if desired, and one of the document types offered is musical scores.  If you are using the Keyword box to input terms, be sure to click on the link next to the box for “Variant Spellings.”  I had forgotten that, way back when, the word “dance” was spelled a number of different ways and by checking the variant spelling boxes for each option, I was able to include all variations of the word in my search.  When searching by author’s name, I also recommend taking a look at the “Select from List” option to make sure that your spelling matches the authority entry for authors in the database.
Results
Results are viewed in a page arrangement with icons for quick navigation. 
      The page icon will give you a complete catalog record for the document and tell you the name of the institution owning the copy scanned for the database
      The camera icon actually opens the document
      The quill tip focuses on illustrations – although my definition of an illustration and EEBO’s classification are slightly different
To view your document, click on the camera, and use the page turn links at the bottom of the screen to navigate. 
PDF and TIFF options
If you would like to see a page in a larger format or you wish to print or save a particular image, click on the PDF and TIFF options at the top of the image viewer.  I was very impressed with the TIFF reader that opened and allowed me to see some spectacular views of images and even manipulate them a little.  You could use the snapshot tool in both TIFF and PDF format to capture the image and use it in a slide presenation or Word document – the possibilities were limitless.
Neat stuff I found
I loved looking at the illustrations in John Playford’s Dancing Master manual.  I found this by using the keyword search box and checking the variant spellings for “dance” and adding “England” in the subject box.  I was able to look at musical scores by John Dowland and Orlando Gibbons, as well as some by  William Byrd.  There were over 15 different editions of Hamlet that I could browse and examine.  It was almost as if I had teleported myself into a library in the middle of London.  Ah, if only I had some proper English tea and scones, the experience would be perfect!

Cook Library now subscribes to the Academic Complete/E-brary database for use both on and off campus.  This database product is just the latest in a number of electronic full text products for research added recently by Cook Library.  E-brary contains full text electronic books on a variety of topics, including music, dance, and theater subjects.  It is easiest to use when you are searching for a specific book title or author, but in the Advanced Search mode, you can search by subject (Beethoven, dance therapy, experimental theater, etc).  I don’t always find that this works well, but it is the closest you can get to the type of subject searching that you can do in the library book catalog.  You can also search by full text occurance of a word or name, but be forewarned that  this often gives too many results.  My advice is to try the subject search, adjust and refine terms, and see what you will get as a result.  You could also first search for a title in WorldCat or the USMAI catalog, then search by title or author in E-brary – this is a pretty efficient way to look for a title if the full text search results are overwhelming.

Once you select a title by clicking on it, the reader window for that title will open as a new window on your browser.  There is an Infotools toolbar at the top of the screen – hover over each icon to see the options you have for navigating within the document.   You will find icons for  printing a page from the e-book, or a quick jump to the book’s index.  You can jump directly to the index and look for a page, then enter the page you would like to see in the Go To box, and voila, the database will jump to that specific page.  Remember to allow for the fact that the page numbers are not exact to the pages of the book as the cover image and introductory pages are counted as numbered pages pdf of the book in the database, but not reflected in the index.

You can register for free with E-brary to create your own bookshelf.  You will need to log in before searching to have access to your virtual bookshelf.  This way, titles that you select to look at are then placed on your bookshelf (unless you choose to delete them).  Bookshelf titles remain on your virtual bookshelf between visits, are quick to retrieve, AND you can highlight and make sticky notes on the pages of the e-book that will remain for you to look at on your next visit.  You will need to provide a user name, password, first and last name, and an email address to be able to register to create a bookshelf.

These are the system requirements to view E-brary content:

System Requirements

• 512MB RAM Minimum; 1GB RAM or more recommended.
• Minimum Java Standard Edition Runtime Environment 1.6 (JRE version 6).
• Linux, Windows XP, Windows Vista.
• Mozilla Firefox browser version 2.0 or newer, or Windows Internet Explorer v. 6 or newer.

If you don’t have these software pieces running, you won’t get to see the content of the e-book.  Pay particular attention to the Java requirement and make sure that you have that version of Java on your computer.

At this point, Cook Library does not have access to the scores/sheet music portion of E-brary, but I am hoping that in upcoming months, we will be able to provide that content as well.  Give the database a whirl and see what you can find.  Remember that we also have e-books for you to use through these library databases:  Netlibrary, Oxford Digital Reference Shelf, and Gale Reference Library, just to name a few.  You will find more e-book offerings on the Cook Library web site’s Databases list.

Lisa

This week, the new interface of the Grove Music database has gone live.  In addition to the trust-worthy Grove products that you know and love, full text access to the Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Oxford Companion to Music have been added.  Additionally, the Advanced Search tab provides you with the ability to search just for biographical entries.

In the event there is a relevant link to an article on your topic that is indexed in RILM database, there will be a link that will take you directly to that journal article citation.  You may need to use the Find It button to see if there are full text options for you to read the article online.

Options for printing and emailing have been made easier, too.  On top of everything else, gone are the small segmented article portions that required frequent visits to the side navigation bar – you can now read your entire article on one screen by scrolling from top to bottom.  If you have not tried the database recently, check it out.

Hi,

I am Lisa Woznicki, the Library Liaison to Art, Dance, Music, and Theater at the Albert S. Cook Library at Towson University in Towson, Maryland.  I hope that you will visit again to check out news about library stuff and my work with the students and faculty at Towson University.